Semester 2 Week 5 Animation Narratives (Artefact/Schematic final thoughts)

Artefact

So I've neglected talking about the artefact and the schematic for a while now, and it's mostly because I've just been busy with getting it done. I've done a lot of work on the Artefacts, and the last week has been putting our ideas together. So I've taken a bunch of photos and done a lot of photo shop work to get these projects together. 

So, I'll quickly run through what I did. we had 9 artefact poster/magazines to put together, each supposedly revealing something about 9 of the main characters. Last blog post I think I talked about scheduling the work, so I'll go through my tasks. For Bjurman's character, we had the idea of two rooms representing the different parts of his personality: the evil side and the family-centric side. I put this together in Maya, lit it, and edited it together. 

BJURMAN. 

The next thing I did was take the pictures for Martin, Henrik, and Harald's covers. Martin's was of the mouth of the Lagan, Henrik's was of the Ormeau Bridge, and Harald's was a picture from the great hall of the John Bell House.  The idea for Martin was to have a picture of the ocean, with black tendrils or spikes coming in from the side of the image. In the film, he hides his bodies in the ocean, which is why we chose the picture of the Lagan, and we also wanted the sense that Martin's personality has a duality, where there's a peaceful veneer on the surface, but evil creeping in. I made this one on my own.

 

Martin

For Harald, who is a Nazi, we wanted the sense that he's a relic of the past, and that he's holding on to an Ideal that's died long ago. So, we took a picture of a great hall, where Nazi party meetings and organizations may have taken place. We wanted him to be totally alone, and have the sense that everyone else is dead or gone as well. I took the picture and edited it, with Neale as the stand-in for Harald.

harald

Finally, for Henrik's we wanted an image of something strong and stalwart, but that is slowly crumbling away. In the story he's being tortured with the memory of Harriet (his granddaughter) and her disappearance, so we represented this idea with an image of a bridge, with glitching effects on it. I took the picture, and Ben edited it.

Henrik ( I don't have the final version yet)

Then, later in the week, we'd planned to do the other 3 images that hadn't been done yet. (Becca did two of them on her own, with our input).  For the Main character, we decided to try and present his presence and attitude on screen. So, we used Ben as a model, and had him hold a cigarette in his mouth, and a handcuff on his wrist. I took the picture with the help of Becca, and then I edited it. We originally wanted smoke from the cigarette, but we were indoors in the Photography studio, and we couldn't do it.

blomkvist

We also had Harriet's image to do. Since she's the one that's missing for the majority of the story, we wanted her to be trapped and unrecognisable. Our original idea was to have an image of a girl screaming, with a mask in front of their face. Then, we'd had a rose petal continuously fall down in front of that, because it's a theme from the movie. It turned out pretty comical, though, so I faded out both the mask and her face, and I liked the eeriness of it. You couldn't really recognize Natasha (our Harriet stand-in), which was neat. I took the images and edited them, with help from the group.

Harriet

Finally, we did Gottfried's image. This was the strangest one we had. Since he's hardly in the movie, and is more of a background character in the story than anything else. He is a false flag for the protagonists though, and he also commits his own share of crimes. So, we wanted the idea that he's covering up the cracks from the past, and is suffocating what's around him. So, we poured honey into cracks in cement, and filmed it. The Honey and Cement were done by Becca, and I filmed it. I also looped the GIF. 

Gottfried.

So, I think our project went pretty well overall. There's a few things I would like to change, but we just don't have the time or ability to. I don't like the way the roses fall on Harriet's image, and I don't like that we couldn't put smoke onto Blomkvist's image, for example. Regardless, we got it all done in a week, which I think is pretty good. We're also on track for completing the project on time without having to put in a ton of work in last minute. I was unhappy with the earlier team dynamics, but things went fine this week. I did still have to organize a lot, but I guess that's the cost of working in a team. 

I think that we should have come up with our Artefact earlier, though. It took us until a week and a half before the deadline to get an Idea down, which in retrospect was too late. We should have been brainstorming from the start, but we didn't really get down to specifics until a while later. I was working on the Schematic a lot at that point though, so I suppose I couldn't really have done both. 

Personally, I think I worked alright, and kept up to date with most of the work. I tried to be as understanding as possible, and I got frustrated with my group when brainstorming the Artefact, which in retrospect was partly due to me not getting my idea approved by the group, and partly due to my frustration with the low-level of research going on. I think I should be less attached to my ideas in the future. 

I also don't like that I became a bit forceful during the project. I think I tried to take too much control, and didn't contribute like a group member for some of the project. I think I became too much of a supervisor and deadline-pusher through the project. In the future I want to stay focused on teamwork instead, and allow others to work their deadlines. It's not my job to force people to work the way I want, and I should keep that in mind for the next project.

Schematic

I haven't really worked as much on this part of the project. I did a lot of the initial work on it, putting all the scenes in a big diagram and labelling where all the characters are and when. Lately though, I've pulled back on it. Neale and Becca have been working on it more than me. Neale's done most of the visuals for the schematic, and Becca has helped him with simplifying what I had done, because my work was too unwieldy to put on a schematic. I'm pretty happy with how the schematic is looking, and besides, the most important part of the schematic is clarity and detail, and I think we've done that part well. The difficulty was in getting the schematic down to something more digestible, and Neale was doing that just fine. On my next blog post, I'll upload the full thing. I also assume we're putting together a portfolio, so I'll put all my work there too.